LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3!

The first Workshop on Computational Neurolinguistics will be held at NAACL next June in Los Angeles. Invited speakers will introduce the audience to the fundamentals of neurolinguistics, and computational models of neural activity.

Call for Papers

Workshop on Computational Neurolinguistics, NAACL HLT 2010

The first Workshop on Computational Neurolinguistics will be held at NAACL next June in Los Angeles. We welcome submissions on the computational treatment of any aspect of language, that either makes use of neural recordings or of biologically realistic neuronal models. To encourage submissions from the broadest community, the organisers are releasing two neural activity datasets, fMRI and EEG, described below. Submissions should be made through the NAACL system, with a deadline of March 1st, 2010: https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/neuroling/

Outline: Computational neurolinguistics is an emerging research area which integrates recent advances in computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience, with the objective of developing cognitively plausible models of language and gaining a better understanding of the human language system. It builds on research in decoding cognitive states from recordings of neural activity, and computational models of lexical representations and sentence processing. Published work in this area includes the discovery of semantic features in neural activity (Mitchell et al, 2008), using brain signals for the relative evaluation of corpus semantic models (Murphy et al, 2009), and recognizing the semantics of adjective-noun meaning composition (Chang et al, 2009).

On-going research focuses on a number of topics such as brain-computer interfaces to provide dictation systems for paraplegic patients, and algorithms to perform tagging and shallow parsing of neural activity recorded during sentence comprehension. Both computational linguistics and neuroscience stand to gain from these techniques. In computational linguistics, the cognitive plausibility of language models has primarily been evaluated against collections of subjective intuitions (e.g. semantic feature norms, grammaticality judgments, corpus annotations, dictionaries). Evaluation of the large body of Computational Linguistics work based on data driven distributional approaches has also relied on hand-crafted resources such as WordNet or data sets manually tagged with a predefined list of categories. Comparison with neural data may provide a more objective yardstick for both models and resources. And in brain imaging, language-related research has often been limited to relatively coarse analyses (e.g. high level features such as animacy or part-of-speech) but now computational neurolinguistic methods have leveraged the richness of corpus-based descriptions to extract finer-grained representations for single lexemes.

Advances in computational neurolinguistics require close collaboration between computational linguists and neuroscientists. To this end, an interdisciplinary workshop can play a key role in advancing existing and initiating new research. We hope that it will attract an interdisciplinary target audience consisting of computational linguists, machine learning researchers, computational neuroscientists and cognitive scientists.

Shared Data-Sets: Submissions based on any data-sets or tasks are welcomed, and originality of approach is encouraged. However, to assist researchers who are new to this topic, we are providing the data used in Mitchell et al. (2008) and Murphy et al. (2009), as well as a number of sample shared tasks. Submissions are welcome that follow the tasks in whole or in part, or simply to use them as an evaluation baseline for their own work. Performance will not be independently validated by the organizers, and will only be one of the criteria used to select among submissions.

The CMU fMRI data-set of 60 concrete concepts, in 12 categories, collected while nine English speakers were presented with 60 line drawings of objects with text labels and were instructed to think of the same properties of the stimulus object consistently during each presentation. For each concept there are 6 instances of ~20k neural activity features (brain blood oxygenation levels): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ekkchang/fMRI/data.html

The Trento EEG data-set for 60 concept concepts, in 2 categories (work tools and land mammals), collected while seven Italian speakers were silently naming photographic images that represent these concepts. For each concept there are 6 instances of ~15k neural activity features (spectral power in voltage signals): http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/brian/compNeuroWSnaacl10/

Sample Shared Tasks: As noted above, submissions on any task are welcomed, and these tasks are primarily intended to provide a possible starting point for researchers who are new to the topic.

Concept-pair neural discrimination task: For two concepts randomly left out of training, teach a classifier to match recorded neural data to the correct lexeme. This may be achieved by taking advantage of corpus-based models of word meaning, as in published research, or otherwise. This task is based on the evaluation method used with fMRI data in Mitchell et al. (2008), and replicated with EEG data in Murphy et al. (2009).

Corpus semantic model evaluation task: Teach a classifier to predict the neural activity observed for single concepts, based on each of several corpus semantic models. The average similarity between observed activity and predicted activity over all concepts can be taken as metric of corpus model fidelity.

Important Dates: March 1, 2010: Deadline for submission of workshop papers March 30, 2010: Notification of acceptance April 12, 2010: Camera-ready papers due June 5 or 6, 2010: Workshop date

Submissions should be formatted using the NAACL 2010 stylefiles, with blind review and not exceeding 8 pages plus an extra page for references. The stylefiles are available at http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html. The PDF files will be submitted electronically through the NAACL submission system, the link will be available later. Each submission will be reviewed at least by two members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Dual submissions to the main NAACL 2010 conference and this workshop are allowed; if you submit to the main session, indicate this when you submit to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main session, you should withdraw your paper from the workshop upon notification by the main session.